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RICHARD GINGRAS: I'm so delighted to do this.
I'm Richard Gingras, Senior Product Director
for News and Social.
I've known Anna for, I don't know,
three, four, five years now, and it's just
always been a pleasure spending time with you,
both for the crispness of your mind
and the wonderful appeal of your sense of humor.
So--
ANNA HOLMES: Thank you.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Thank you.
And that obviously--
ANNA HOLMES: Thanks for having me.
RICHARD GINGRAS: --that always shows in what you do.
But it's great to have you here.
ANNA HOLMES: Thank you.
RICHARD GINGRAS: So recently, Anna published-- just
came out with a book, "The Book of Jezebel."
But I thought today, we'd actually talked
about a bit more than.
We'll talk about "The Book of Jezebel,"
but I also want to talk about Jezebel in and of itself.
One of things that occurs to me, as I think many of us
in this room know, is as we've seen
very dramatic changes in the underlying media
ecosystem, that creates opportunities,
and, indeed, the need, on the part of traditional publishers,
to figure out how do they create products
appropriate for this medium.
And in a similar fashion, as cultures change and evolve,
there are also opportunities for new voices
to appear and address those cultural changes
with the audiences that are affected by them.
I think the interesting thing about homes in Jezebel
is that in founding Jezebel she's really done both.
Both, being considerably hard, figuring out
what kind of product can work in this realm,
and Jezebel has, indeed, and continues
to work in this realm.
And also, in figuring out how to address a media landscape
with an approach that makes sense for the new culture,
for the evolving culture.
And in that, with Jezebel, she created,
a site which was unapologetic in its politics
and its sensibilities, provocative, funny, insightful,
sometimes profane.
Anna, I know, hoped that it would be,
and I believe, to an extent, it has,
but I'll have you address that at some point, an antidote
to the historical superficiality in a relevance of women's media
properties.
A little bit of her background, and then we'll start getting
into the why's and where's.
Because you weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth.
You were--
ANNA HOLMES: Uh-uh.
RICHARD GINGRAS: --born in Sacramento, raised in Davis.
I believe your mom was a schoolteacher,
your dad a park ranger in the National Park Service.
In the late '90s you went to New York, started out, as a--
ANNA HOLMES: Actually, in the early '90s.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Early '90s.
ANNA HOLMES: I'm older than you think.
[LAUGHTER]
RICHARD GINGRAS: Started out as an intern
at "The New Yorker." you worked at places like "Glamour,"
"Entertainment Weekly," "HBO."
All, I think, good experiences for you
to understand at least the traditional media environment.
And then went off to do what you did with Jezebel.
You left Jezebel in 2010, and then
went on to do the book of Jezebel, which
if you haven't looked at it, it's really a wonderful book.
And its, I think, both seriously irreverent
and irreverently serious.
As, I think, befits the brand.
And by the way, I don't know if you noticed,
but you actually now get a Google auto suggest,
if you type in "Anna Holmes is."
ANNA HOLMES: Oh.
[LAUGHTER]
ANNA HOLMES: God.
Why would you do that? [LAUGH]
RICHARD GINGRAS: I did.
I did.
But so far, all good, because all it says
is Anna Holmes is the founder of Jezebel.
ANNA HOLMES: Oh, OK.
RICHARD GINGRAS: So congratulations.
ANNA HOLMES: I don't Google myself.
RICHARD GINGRAS: No, that's--
ANNA HOLMES: I like Google, but I don't Google myself.
RICHARD GINGRAS: You really should put that on your resume.
ANNA HOLMES: OK. [LAUGH]
RICHARD GINGRAS: So, but let's start talking, first of all,
about the creation of Jezebel itself.
And before I do, I think appropriate context.
When I was going through the book,
I came upon the definition for lady journalist, which
has four definitions, and I'll read the four.
One, thin, pretty, 30-something woman
who is sometimes allowed to handle the less
hard-hitting television news.
Two, a writer capable of covering fashion,
celebrity gossip, and the mommy wars
who's better off leaving long-form investigative
reporting to more qualified colleagues.
Three, just like regular journalists,
only without the awards.
And four, a smart, tough woman who
loves news enough to fight through all that ***
and do it anyway.
ANNA HOLMES: Hmm.
RICHARD GINGRAS: And it seemed, quite frankly,
that number four is you.
ANNA HOLMES: Oh.
Thanks.
RICHARD GINGRAS: So tell us about that,
because I'm sure creating Jezebel was filled
with complexities and challenges.
I'd love to hear the story.
ANNA HOLMES: OK.
I'll tell you the story a bit.
If it goes on too long than you should-- because--
RICHARD GINGRAS: Feel free to--
ANNA HOLMES: --it could be a long story.
I guess I should start with the fact
that I had worked at women's magazines
before I started the site.
And when I say women's magazines,
I mean women's service magazines,
such as "Glamour" and "In Style."
I also worked at "Celebrity" magazines.
Sometimes those two things intersect, women's
magazines and celebrity magazines.
And that was more just kind of a function.
That wasn't so much my interest.
But that's where the jobs were in New York in media.
And a lot of my other female friends,
who may be arrived in New York and thought oh, we
want to work for "Harper's," or "The Atlantic," or "The New
Yorker," found ourselves working in much more
commercial publications, a lot of which
we didn't like or agree with.
That was me.
I wouldn't say that I hated celebrity news,
I just was kind of ambivalent about it or bored by it.
And with regards to women's magazines,
I actively hated them, because I felt that they were patronizing
and were repeating the same messages over
and over and over again to young women, which
were along the lines of be obsessed
with men, romantically.
Thereby, totally pushing out women who were not interested
in men, so they were very heteronormative.
They were about finding a man-- and I said this line a lot,
so if you're heard it, you're going to hear it again.
So they were about finding a man, keeping a man,
pleasing a man, making sure he doesn't leave you
for another woman.
Not really about women and what they wanted,
but women being afraid of losing things at all times.
And also they were very obsessed with physical appearance,
and dieting, and so on and so forth.
And it's just so snooze worthy, and it was offensive.
Because I could be a 32-year-old and think that I had some sort
of buffer against the messages that were being communicated
in these magazines, and maybe I did, and maybe I didn't.
But I knew for a fact that there were younger women who
were probably more influenced by those messages in the same way
that maybe I had been when I had been 18 or 20 or 22.
So I really hated all the jobs I had at women's magazines,
because I felt like I was part of the problem.
But I needed to pay my rent.
I couldn't be like oh, I'm going to go write a novel.
And at the time that Jezebel first
started getting discussed, it was late 2006
and I was working at "In Style," which of all the women's
magazines I'd worked for, was the least offensive
because it was pretty straightforward.
It was about there would be a celebrity on the cover
and there would be an interview with her.
And maybe some pictures from her house, and then
someone else's house further in the magazine.
And maybe a spread of the dresses
for spring and maybe some makeup tips.
I mean that was much less offensive to me
than how to lose 30 pounds in 30 days,
or how to use a hair scrunchie in a sex act.
That sort of stuff.
So "In Style" was actually, again,
pretty inoffensive, so I wasn't as riled
up about women's magazines as I had been.
But in late 2006 there was a woman
I'd worked with at a celebrity magazine, who
was my friend, who was friends with Nick Denton.
And Nick Denton owns Gawker Media.
And he wanted her to start what he was calling girly gawker.
That was a placeholder name, I think.
One of his colleagues is over here in the front row.
So I'm pretty sure girly gawker was a placeholder name.
So the friend of mine, Geraldine,
asked me if I'd be interested in working
on this project with her, and I said no, immediately.
The first thing I said was no, no, no, no, no.
Because I was a consumer of the internet,
in the sense that I bought things on Amazon or eBay.
I read the internet, and then I read "The New York Times"
online, or I read CNN.com, or I read
"Gawker," or any number of blogs.
But is was still not an environment in which people
in mainstream media or print media,
they were not moving over to the internet, really,
at least the ones that I knew, and because they
weren't getting paid well.
And the whole knock against Gawker Media,
up until that point, was that they
didn't pay people very well.
They were paying bloggers maybe $12 a post.
And at the time I was 34 and I was probably
making $80,000, $90,000 as an editor at "In Style,"
and there was no way I was going to take a job that
was going to pay me half that.
I didn't have a trust fund, unfortunately.
So, I said, no, but then we spent
about two hours talking about what it could be.
And in this iteration, it was to be very celebrity focused.
So we just figured we'd make snarky comments
about celebrity culture.
She then decided, Geraldine the friend,
to not work on the site, for reasons
that are somewhat unknown to me, but it
had to do with her wanting to go back home to England
to be closer to her family.
And so I was asked by Nick Denton and his deputy-- Well,
I guess I wasn't asked.
It's they told me that I was going to be running or starting
this on my own.
And at that point, maybe the parameters
had been broadened beyond celebrity to include fashion.
And I thought, OK, I can oversee media property that
covers that stuff because I've certainly
worked within those genres before,
but I find the way that they've been presented in the past
to be offensive.
And so I wanted to create a women's site
that would incorporate those topics,
but not focus on them exclusively.
That would treat them or present them in a smart way.
That would not purport to tell the readers
who or what they should be.
Would not promote conspicuous consumption.
Because I really felt, at that time, in 2006, 2007, so many
of these magazines were all about $1,000 Louis Vuitton
purses.
And it was like a frenzy of acquisition.
It was crazy, and I found it offensive,
and most people can't afford that stuff,
or oftentimes they were spending their paychecks on crap.
And I just felt women were really being ill-served.
I kind of felt it was tied into the "Sex In The City" stuff.
This like obsession with name brands and luxury goods.
I found it really gross.
So when I was conceiving of what this site would be,
it was pretty simple.
It was that it would be something I'd want to read,
and it would be a kind of rebuke to women's magazines,
because the whole kind ethos of Gawker Media at that time
was that their sites when after the big boys.
So Gawker itself went after large media companies
on a regular basis, like Conde Nast, and Time Inc.,
and Hearst.
ESPN was in the crosshairs of Deadspin.
Apple was often being taunted by Gizmodo.
So it made sense that we would go after women's magazines.
And I felt that I knew just the way
to do it because I had a lot of decades of frustration
with them pent up.
But in addition to that, that would kind of announce what
we weren't, which is to say to go after women's magazines,
but announce what we were not going to be.
But we would also have content that you didn't often
find in women's magazines, like politics,
and a vibrant kind of constant repetitive discussion
of politics, whether that's electoral politics or gender
politics.
Because all the women I knew did not just
want to talk about fashion and celebrity.
They were much more diverse and well-rounded.
And in terms of diversity, that was another thing that
had bugged me, which was that the world
I lived in, and granted I lived in New York,
which is a very diverse city.
But the world I lived in was not reflected
on the pages of women's magazines
or even in a lot of media.
It was very, very, very white.
And I am not white, and I felt that was--
I don't know if I'd use the word offensive--
but it wasn't in keeping with the times,
because it was, at that point, 2007, and I was seeing a lot
more-- Everything felt more global and diverse than it had,
let's say, when I'd been growing up in Davis in the '70s.
But I wasn't seeing that reflected
on TV very much and in magazines.
So that's kind of a long story, or what
I was thinking about doing when we were putting
the site together, and conceiving what kind
of features would be on there, and when it got named,
[LAUGH] by Gabi, who's sitting in the front row,
and I hated the name.
I wouldn't really use the name.
I wouldn't admit to the name of the site to people publicly.
Even like a year later, I just kind of for some reason
it rubbed me the wrong way.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Did its success surprise you?
What were your expectations when you went in?
ANNA HOLMES: That's a good question.
Well, I mean I felt that I was-- I
went into it with a feeling of a little bit,
like I was kind of holding my breath.
Because first of all, I hadn't been
planning to start the site on my own.
I thought I was going to do it with my friend,
and then she drops out, so now it's on me.
And I was well aware of the fact that New York media
people read Gawker sites.
And that might be a tiny little population,
but their opinion mattered to me.
And therefore, the site had to succeed, because if it
didn't, then it would be on me.
And this would be the first time my name had ever
been at the top of something.
And I really felt that I had control over whether or not
it succeeded.
And the way I could control that was
that I could just work my butt off on it.
So that even if it didn't succeed,
at least I would know that I had given my all.
And that translated into me working 18 hours a day
and eventually getting burned out
three and a half years later.
But I had to suspect that there were
other women my age, or younger, or older
who were also frustrated and felt ill-served
by women's media.
I didn't know that for a fact, but I
had to assume that they existed, and that they weren't just
exactly like me and my peer group,
but that they were all over the country
and maybe all over the world.
But I wasn't sure that it was going to work.
There were some naysayers who-- I wouldn't
say they were-- maybe they were just being pessimistic.
But there were some naysayers within the company,
who are my friends, who weren't sure
after they saw some of the test blogs, which
is to say us doing the site, but behind a firewall,
if that's the right word, before it went live.
Who kind of went eh, I don't know,
because they hadn't seen anything like that before,
and I guess I hadn't either.
So I wasn't at all confident that it was going to succeed,
but it was one of the only times in my life, I think,
when not only when I had total control over something,
but that I had to really just believe.
And it sounds corny, but believe in myself,
or believe that other people would-- that if I built it,
they would come.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Can you touch a little bit on the mechanics,
because, obviously, folks here, we don't do editorial.
How big was the team when you started?
And how was it constructed?
How many pieces a day?
How did you deal with, as you said,
were you paying people $12 a post?
ANNA HOLMES: No.
Oh yeah, one thing I didn't say, the reason
I decided to do it was because the editorial director
of the company told me how much he would pay me per year,
and he was going to match my salary, my "In Style" salary.
And I was like, OK, well that changes things.
Because, again, I don't want to go backwards.
That said, at the time, they didn't have health insurance
or benefits, the company didn't.
So I was losing out a little bit,
but it wasn't-- I think I was still under the impression that
I would never get sick.
Oh, it's OK-- I don't have to have
health insurance for a year or so.
So was really what made me decide to go for it.
But how was it constructed.
Well, I was given a budget and I was allowed to hire two people.
So I hired one woman, Moe, in maybe March or April of 2007.
And then the next staffer, Jennifer, maybe a month later.
And that was actually one of the most fun
times on the site was sitting around mostly
with Moe, whose real name is Maureen,
and just thinking of ideas and different features we would do.
Because were going to blog, which is to say,
put up posts that were reacting to the news of the day
that we couldn't predict.
But also, we wanted to have kind of standalone features
that we could count on.
And I feel like we got paid to sit around and have
awesome ideas.
It was really great, and made us excited for the site
to actually launch.
So once it launched, there were three of us.
I did write probably four or five posts a day
because there were only three of us,
and we were trying to post once every half an hour or so.
As the site got bigger, and I really
don't if I can pinpoint when it got bigger.
But it was successful pretty quickly,
in that it got attention, and it was getting press,
and there were readers and they were commenting.
And it seemed like something was going on.
But about a month after the launch,
I got to hire somebody else.
And then I got to hire somebody else.
And by, I'd say, Fall of 2007, I had maybe five people total.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Plus freelance, I imagine.
ANNA HOLMES: Yeah.
I think I still wasn't willing to use freelancers
that much then just because we didn't have a big budget.
And because I knew that I could count on these five people
that I had.
They were easier to deal with.
Like they were easier to anticipate what
their various quirks, and neuroses, and writing styles
were like.
And so I'd say that by a couple months in,
we were posting once every 20 minutes.
It became very neurotic about scheduling because there
was so much going on, that we had to comment on,
and I wanted it done in a certain order.
And in order to keep my brain from melting,
I would have us post every 20 minutes or every 10 minutes.
So you'd see a little time stamp,
it would say 9 o'clock, 9:10.
When I could have just posted it whenever it was done
and I'd edited it.
But for some reason, that added some order to the chaos.
And I'd say by the second or third year,
we were posting 70 to 80 things a day,
which meant that there were things
going up every 5 or 10 minutes.
But it was very highly scheduled,
in that things had to balance each other out.
So the first post that went up every day was at 9:00.
I would get up at six, and I would start finding stories
for the writers to consider doing.
And they would usually get online at like 7:00, 7:30.
We all worked remotely from our apartments.
So they would get online.
I'd see them come on IM, and then we'd have a little chat,
and I'd send them stories that they could consider.
So the first post was always a gossip roundup.
And then the next post was always
something like the news of the day-- it could
have been like something hard-newsy.
The next post after that was usually about politics,
and I know politics and hard news can be the same thing,
but I tried to keep them separate,
at least in those two posts.
And then the next one would be about a party that
had happened the night before, and the writer
would be evaluating the outfits at some party,
that she had not been to.
But Like some movie premiere with starlets and stuff.
And so I tried to balance out the topics-- something serious,
something superficial, something serious.
But also we would put pictures in between the posts,
as kind of breathing room, like interstitial.
So I guess the best way to describe
it is, I had a grad student come sit with me for three weeks
and watch me work for a paper she was doing,
and she described it as I was an air traffic controller.
I feel like that was a good summation.
I was trying to not have planes crash.
Not that it was really-- I mean that's kind of hyperbole
because no one was going to get hurt.
But it did feel like there were a lot of things happening all
at once, and the writers were IM'ing me,
and I'm looking at an RSS feed, and then Facebook,
and my emails, and there's the TV on next to me so I can see
if something-- if Kathy Lee says something stupid on the "Today
Show" so I can clip it.
And it was crazy.
It was totally crazy.
RICHARD GINGRAS: I was tracking your numbers then, and--
ANNA HOLMES: You were?
RICHARD GINGRAS: --you built an audience very quickly.
Well, Gawker, I have a lot of regard Gawker.
I mean there are some folks who are critical of their sites,
others are not.
But frankly, Nick and the larger team
have come up with properties that have worked, and have been
successful, and actually make money.
ANNA HOLMES: Uh-huh.
RICHARD GINGRAS: But there's different kinds of impact.
Do you have a sense of what the impact of Jezebel
has been on traditional media, particularly women's media?
Can you assess that?
ANNA HOLMES: No.
I mean people tell me, but I can't assess it
for a couple of reasons.
It might be reluctance, because I
think that if I say what I really suspect,
and that's somehow self-aggrandizing.
Or it could be the fact is that I feel,
even though I don't run the site, still
too in the midst of it.
I can look back and say, yes, something was happening
between 2007 and 2010, the time that I was there,
that I saw being reflected.
Whether it was kind of copycat sites-- and I
don't mean that in an insulting way.
But women sites that popped up that were
similar in nature and in tone that came after us that I felt
were kind of imitating our style.
Or things I was seeing in the culture,
in the larger, whether it was popular culture
or whether it was the fact that I was seeing
more discussion of gender politics
and feminism in mainstream media where I had not really
seen that before.
And I could suspect that maybe that was because of what
my writers were doing, and that they
were getting a lot of attention.
But there was no way for me to quantify.
I had no proof.
It was just kind of a feeling.
And I think I was reluctant to make a direct connection
because it is and was entirely possible that we just
came around at a certain time when there was a ground
swell or a hunger for that sort of content
and we rode a wave, as opposed to we're
the earthquake that started the wave.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Like I said, the local properties, there
are fans, there are non-fans.
I mean I've been a daily reader of Jezebel from the beginning.
ANNA HOLMES: Really?
RICHARD GINGRAS: I have been, absolutely, to this day.
Even though, it's not as when you ran it.
I have to say that, right?
But--
ANNA HOLMES: It's bigger.
RICHARD GINGRAS: But I'm a guy, and I'm not, obviously,
the target demo.
The feminist blogosphere, Jezebel
can be a bit contentious.
Is it a feminist blog, or is it not?
What are your thoughts about that,
in a relationship with Jezebel to feminism?
ANNA HOLMES: I never called it publicly a feminist
blog because that was, I felt unfair to what
I think are actual feminist blogs.
And by that I mean not for profit, labors of love,
done by a person or persons that are very activist in nature,
and whose content is solely focused
on the discussion of feminism and gender politics.
I felt that they deserved that kind of definition,
and that I wasn't going to announce that Jezebel was that
because we weren't.
I mean there's a certain tension between talking
about serious subjects, like gender politics
and making money, I don't think that they
are in total conflict.
But in the end, we were still a site
that was commercial in nature.
It may have been a labor of love, but I being paid for it,
and so was everybody else.
And the expectation was that we would grow,
and advertisers would advertise, and there
was a whole other element there.
So that's why I didn't want to use the term feminist blog,
but I don't have a problem with the word feminist.
Quite the contrary.
Part of my frustration growing up
had been that my peers, from a very young age-- and by peers,
I mean my female peers-- had been very reluctant to define
themselves or call themselves feminists,
even if they agreed with its basic goals.
And I think that that's because the word had been dirtied up,
especially during my childhood, during the '80s
and in the '90s by a variety of people.
I think that it came to mean something
that was far more radical and hard to swallow
than what it really was.
And I guess I never had a problem describing myself
as a feminist because my mother always described herself
as a feminist.
So I had that as a role model.
And as I got older, and I realized that not everyone was
as open to talking about feminism
or embracing it as I was, I became very frustrated.
And I think that was the case with women's magazines.
They just didn't get that political.
So with the site, we weren't a feminist blog,
but we were going to talk about all the time.
And talk about it in an unapologetic and repetitive
way.
I felt that people tiptoed around the word in the same way
that they tiptoed around the word abortion,
or that they tiptoe around the word ***,
because these are all things that
might make people uncomfortable.
And so we would not only talk about those things,
but we would use them regularly in headlines,
when appropriate and without apology.
That we would kind of model to the readers
that there was nothing to be ashamed
of or there was no reason to be tiptoeing around a lot
these more difficult subjects.
So people thought of us as being a feminist blog,
but I never would, again, would have publicly said that.
I would have said oh, we're a women's site with where
we try to take a progressive look at the culture
through pop culture.
And we tried to use pop culture, and fashion, and celebrity
as entry points into more serious discussions.
That was really the ultimate goal of the site.
In my like most ambitious, and perhaps, bone-headed moments,
I thought, well, we're going to politicize
a population of young women who maybe haven't
thought about these things, or been
privy to these conversations.
And we're going to do it because they're
going to come to look at pictures
of Misha Barton walking down an LA street,
and they're going to stay because they're
going to be interested in the post that comes after it.
And they're going to be interested in not only the way
the writer constructs the post and the language that she uses,
which is often humor, but the conversations
and the comments that follow.
And that was an interesting thing
is that I do feel a lot of the readers got politicized,
and it wasn't just the work of myself or the writers,
it was oftentimes the other readers.
Because I do think that people are reluctant to be lectured.
And so I don't think we did any lecturing in the posts.
And I do feel like the readers were more,
because they had created such a community,
that they were much more likely, in many instances,
to listen to one another.
So sometimes we would put up a post
where we would leave stuff out on purpose.
I don't mean like leave a fact out,
but just the discussion wouldn't be as nuanced or as detailed
as it could have been because it gave the commenters something
meaty to chew on and talk about themselves.
And that was really exciting.
But I do think that we did politicize
a lot of young women.
I don't know what a lot is.
I mean I can't get numbers.
But and I was hoping we would do that.
And I thought that by using, again,
these kind of more accessible topics,
like pop culture or celebrity culture,
that we could do just that.
RICHARD GINGRAS: I'm interested to hear
you talk about the tone.
I'm always fascinated with the art and science of crafting
the right tone for a site, and you managed to do that.
But I want to move on to the book,
because I want to make sure we talk about in the book,
and also make sure we have time for questions from folks.
Also, a plug for the book, it's available outside the door
for the heavily Google-y subsidized price of $10.
ANNA HOLMES: Yeah.
RICHARD GINGRAS: It's a beautiful book.
ANNA HOLMES: They really subsidized it. [LAUGH]
RICHARD GINGRAS: Superb paper.
Really nice.
ANNA HOLMES: I'm very grateful.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Buy a bunch.
Give them as gifts to friends.
ANNA HOLMES: Yes.
RICHARD GINGRAS: So I've got to tell you.
I got the book last week.
I opened it up for the first time to a page in the letter P.
And the first entry that hit me was patriarchy.
ANNA HOLMES: Ah, I thought you were going to say ***.
RICHARD GINGRAS: --whose definition was "smash it."
So my only question there, I didn't
realize that Amazon had the technology
to detect my gender on a book and cause
me to open to a specific page.
ANNA HOLMES: Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Yeah, I'm impressed too.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Very clever.
ANNA HOLMES: You should join forces with them.
RICHARD GINGRAS: You pulled that off.
ANNA HOLMES: [LAUGH]
RICHARD GINGRAS: But it's encyclopedia.
And I think it's an interesting format that you chose.
I think there's a fine history of that,
from whether it's John Stuart's wonderful textbook,
"A Citizen's Guide to Democracy,"
or you could, frankly, go back to Ambrose Bierce
and "The Devil's Dictionary," which is one of my favorite.
By the way, its definition for apology
was to lay the foundation for a future offense.
[LAUGHTER]
ANNA HOLMES: I like that.
RICHARD GINGRAS: So what caused you to choose the format?
ANNA HOLMES: Well, that wasn't the first book idea that I had.
The first idea I had, and I'm so glad it didn't happen.
But at the time, this is in 2010,
I was still obsessed with Sarah Palin.
She really got under my skin, and had since 2008.
I mean if you go back and look at the posts
on the site in 2008, there was at least one or two posts a day
just going after her, after she got nominated.
I was like I just couldn't deal.
And so it got channeled into my writers.
So I was like let's do a book from Sarah Palin's point
of view that's like making fun of her.
And I wanted to do a yearbook.
It would yearbook format, and it would be Sarah Palin's
yearbook, and the high school would be DC.
So the principal was Obama, and the vice president or vice
principal was Biden, and she was one of the juniors.
And it would be a yearbook format
that she would have written in, her friends
would have written in, but ultimately, it
would have been making fun of her.
Now, I still think that could maybe have worked,
but we were not comedy writers.
We could be funny, but you need "Mad" magazine to pull that
off, because every single thing in the book like that
has to be funny.
And we just couldn't execute that, so that got shelved.
Also good, because if that had actually gone forward
and that had come out now, everyone
would have been like Sarah Palin?
Who cares.
She's just became much more irrelevant, thank God.
So then I thought, OK, how can we
sum up the sensibility of the site into a book?
And I like reference books.
I like sitting around reading atlas's, and dictionaries,
and encyclopedias.
And I also have very fond memories
of sitting in my bed, as a kid, reading
I think it was a set of Golden Book encyclopedias.
I think it was children's encyclopedias,
with lots of pictures about space or [INAUDIBLE]
or what have you.
So I thought why don't we do an encyclopedia of the world
according to the sensibility of the site.
And that seemed to be OK with everyone else who was involved
in the concept, and the execution,
and the selling of the book.
I also kind of wanted to preserve,
in printed form, the site, at least when I had run it.
Like have something tangible that would last,
because blogs are so ephemeral.
And I would meet people who had read the site,
or I would talk to former staffers
and we would reminisce about the post
that Moe did about-- I'm actually not going
to say what it was because it was really gross.
But we would have very fun discussions about posts
that had been put up on the site that had made a splash
or that we just loved.
And I wanted to, again, have a permanent piece of the site.
And I don't think the book is only
reflective of 2007 to 2010.
There's a lot of stuff from the current iteration
of the site in there.
But that's what I know best is that era.
And I think the things that are missing in the book,
and there are many of them that I forgot about
or I realized too late, are totally indicative of where
my head is at at any given moment,
or the pop culture products that are on my radar.
And so when someone the other day
asked me, why don't you have Lauryn Hill in there?
And I was like, yeah, right, I don't
have Lauryn Hill in there.
But maybe that's because Lauryn Hill was--
RICHARD GINGRAS: She just got out of jail.
ANNA HOLMES: Well, I know she'd been in jail,
where she was off-- She wasn't in my consciousness.
And I really did try to remember, think of everything,
but that was kind of impossible.
So maybe there'll be a second edition.
RICHARD GINGRAS: I mean a lot of the stuff
was written just for the book.
ANNA HOLMES: It was all written just for the book.
Yeah.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Right, OK.
And you had a very impressive stable
of contributors, a lot of great writers.
ANNA HOLMES: A lot of them had been staffers on the site,
or were current staffers of the site,
or had been contributors in some way,
or had just been in that genre of lady blogs
and I liked their work.
But it really was I did not write the book.
I wrote like maybe 20 entries, and there's 1,000 in there.
I oversaw the whole thing, but it
was the writers who-- they were given assignments
and they executed them very well.
And I think you can tell that there
are different voices in there.
But it also depends on the post, because a post about Sarah
Palin is going to be somewhat jokey and mean-spirited, as
opposed to a post about Planned Parenthood, which is actually
quite straightforward about the history of how it came to be.
RICHARD GINGRAS: One of my reactions to it
was I would start an entry sort of expecting kind of a jokey
and snarky, and instead I'll get something serious.
And you kind of whip-lashed me every time--
ANNA HOLMES: Sorry.
RICHARD GINGRAS: [INERPOSING VOICES],
which was cool.
But the format, I think, one thing I love,
I think the format makes it much more accessible.
It's not a tone that you feel somehow a responsibility
to read, and just for a reluctance to start.
You can just play with it.
ANNA HOLMES: You can flip around.
And there's also pictures, which I think makes it fun.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Yeah.
ANNA HOLMES: And that's what I wanted.
I wanted to have a lot of visuals
to it, just because I really like pictures.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Buy the physical book in this case.
ANNA HOLMES: It's better than eBook.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Much more fun than the eBook.
ANNA HOLMES: It is.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Let's go to questions.
AUDIENCE: I want to ask you just about the tone
of the website itself.
Did you intentionally set out to be snarky,
because that's the Gawker voice.
And did you mean to be mean to everybody or just
some select few?
ANNA HOLMES: I don't think we were mean to everybody.
I think we were just mean to women's magazines, fashion
designers who are ***, Republicans.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: And that would be people
that maybe you personally didn't like,
or just all Republicans, all--
ANNA HOLMES: At that point, pretty much all Republicans,
because they were bananas then, and they kind of still
are, at least the Party.
I'm not saying civilian Republicans are all bananas.
We could have been more fair about things,
but we all had a similar point of view.
And a lot of what was underlying the tone on those posts
was anger.
And I think it was often channeled into humor,
because I do think that a lot of great humor
comes from an angry place, or a sense of frustration
with the world and how society is structured.
But when a post had to be angry, it was just angry.
And when it maybe needed some humor
because there was really nothing else you could do.
Like, for example, there's no way
to really get angry about Congresswoman Michele Bachmann,
because she's ridiculous.
So you just made fun of her. [LAUGH]
Whereas, I think it's much more legitimate to get angry at,
for our purposes, the assault on reproductive rights going on
throughout various legislatures around the country.
Yes, you can make jokes about stupid stuff
that politicians say.
But the underlying reality of what was going, is going on,
was not something that was easy to joke about.
But it's funny, because Gawker was known for being snarky.
So that was a lot of it.
And also, it just happened, like the first person I hired,
Moe Tkacik, is very pointed, and biting, and very,
very brilliant, and can be extremely mean, and very funny.
And because she was the first hire,
I feel like she also set a certain tone.
Because I wouldn't describe myself as a funny writer.
I can appreciate good humor, and maybe I can be funny sometimes,
but there's no way-- that the humor on the site
was not being channeled for me.
It really was thanks to the specific writers.
And, again, Gawker's overall kind of snark.
AUDIENCE: But it sounds like you did have some issues
that you take seriously and that you kind of campaigned
on inverted commas.
ANNA HOLMES: Yeah.
Every single day.
Yeah.
There was a different tone to every post,
but it also depended on who wrote it.
And I think one of the great things that Gawker did,
and this was maybe a month after the site launched, was they
put bylines on posts, across all their blogs.
Before then there had been no bylines,
so you never knew which of the writers
was writing what on any of the sites.
And then you would see things, like on gawker.com
specifically, a use of the royal "we."
I feel like maybe the tone was more, not coherent,
but cohesive, because there was no way
to distinguish which of the Gawker editors or writers
was writing any particular thing.
And once we got by bylines, then I just let the writers go.
Because also, they were working really hard.
They worked 10 hours a day, nonstop.
They would have to read multiple articles
and process them in their head, and then somehow spit
them back out in a well-written funny way.
And do all that within the course of 45 minutes,
and then I'd edit it and put it up,
and then they'd do it again, like over and over
and over and over again.
So there was no way that I was going
to be able to edit them into a royal "we."
But also, they would have resented it,
because I was asking so much of them that I
had to let them write in their own voice
and write the things they wanted to write.
Otherwise, I would have had a miserable staff.
And I was, again, asking so much of them already.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Who's next?
Yes.
AUDIENCE: So with your writers working 10 hours a day,
it sounds like there was a huge push for quantity.
So were you trying to, i producing so many articles,
just have broader appeal to your readers,
or just by the nature of a website looking for traffic?
And if so, did that ever worry you
about the erosion of the quality of the articles?
ANNA HOLMES: No one ever pushed me
to have-- I think if I had gone to Nick Denton
and say, how many posts are we supposed to put up a day?
He would've just said, eh, 20 or so.
I mean I was putting up 70.
And that was not because he told me to
or anyone else told me to.
It was because we wanted to cover a lot of ground.
We felt extremely energized and excited.
And then the more successful the site got, the more crazy I got.
Which I don't mean that in a negative way so much.
But if we were getting a certain result
and I was working at 200% capacity,
then I figured if I worked at 300% capacity
I'd get a different result.
And there was this energy that made us,
or me-- I should just say me-- made me,
and then, therefore, make the staffers work even harder.
But we were getting stuff back from the readers.
It wasn't like we were putting stuff out there
and it was just dying on the vine.
I mean it felt like there was this incredible momentum.
And there was so much to talk about,
that it felt very heady and awesome.
But yeah, there were certainly pressures
to hit certain traffic goals, but I didn't really
worry about them that much because we always hit them,
for the most part.
I mean the site was just growing.
There was some months, maybe, when
it would grow a little less.
But I never had, from what I remember--
I mean I could go back and look at traffic stats--
but I don't remember there ever being a dip
or where I was taken aside and someone said,
you need to fix something because the traffic's not
going up.
I mean at one point, when Gawker Media was using page views
as the metric by which people were judged, before they switch
to unique visitors.
I think it was in 2008.
And it became clear that we were going
to out-do gawker.com in page views.
And gawker.com had been around-- when did it start?
2004?
RICHARD GINGRAS: Um-hmm.
ANNA HOLMES: 2002?
OK.
So Gawker had been around for six years
and was a big well-known media property,
and we were going to out-do them in page views
within two year of our launch.
RICHARD GINGRAS: In fact, in January 2010,
you did about four million page views to Gawker's 2.7.
ANNA HOLMES: Yeah.
[LAUGH]
RICHARD GINGRAS: And your edit staff
generated about four million--
ANNA HOLMES: Are you sure that's page views,
because I feel like we had least 30.
That may have been uniques.
Really?
Because I feel like--
RICHARD GINGRAS: No.
This is page views.
Uniques were three million for Gawker and--
ANNA HOLMES: Because we were usually--
RICHARD GINGRAS: --two for you.
ANNA HOLMES: --in the 20s, in like a 20 million, 30 million
page views.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Maybe this is wrong.
ANNA HOLMES: Well, regardless--
RICHARD GINGRAS: Oh, I'm sorry, 44 million.
ANNA HOLMES: Yeah, OK.
RICHARD GINGRAS: I missed a digit.
ANNA HOLMES: [LAUGH] And I was very competitive with Gawker,
even though they were a different site
in some respects.
RICHARD GINGRAS: They were 35 million, and you were 44.
ANNA HOLMES: That's right.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Actually, the 2.76 was-- See,
I did this analysis.
ANNA HOLMES: I wasn't disbelieving you.
I just felt like--
RICHARD GINGRAS: The average Jezebel contributor
did four and a half million page views.
ANNA HOLMES: Ah, OK.
RICHARD GINGRAS: They received 2.75 [INAUDIBLE] there, see?
ANNA HOLMES: So that's very exciting
when you get that sort of traffic
and you just want to keep doing what you're doing
or do it better.
But it made me burnout and a number of other people burnout.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Not surprising.
Next?
AUDIENCE: You kind of talked about at the beginning
how when you were going to Jezebel,
there was a demographic of women that hadn't been touched.
You wanted to go away from the material stick, fluffy women
stuff, and talk about maybe more substantive,
whether it's sassy, irreverent, whatever.
Once you launched Jezebel, what did you
learn from a lot of the viewers or the readers?
Did you get a lot of feedback?
Did a lot of people write in?
Did they like a lot of that content?
Like this demographic was new to you, so once you entered it,
what did you learn from that group?
ANNA HOLMES: When you say did they like that sort of content,
do you mean the more serious content, or did they like--
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
So just the edge of Jezebel, probably.
That you were taking bold stands.
That you were maybe talking about maybe some more serious
things.
ANNA HOLMES: They didn't write in so much,
but they didn't need to because they would just comment.
And they were there under every post within two minutes of it
going up.
And then it would just snowball from there.
Either they were talking to us, or they
were talking to each other.
And when I say talking, that means
having a nice conversation, or maybe
they were giving us the virtual finger or what have you.
It ran the gamut.
But what I learned, and, again, these are the commenters,
I think, modeling for the other readers.
Because a lot of people read the site and read
the comments but didn't comment.
But the commenters were notorious
for being any number of things-- argumentative, pain in the ***,
totally intelligent and hilarious.
I mean they were great and they were horrible.
And when I say horrible, just because I would get annoyed
with them.
They actually weren't that horrible.
They were modeling in the comments what I suspected,
which was that when that 10:30 post went up
about the red carpet for the premiere of "Meet the Fockers,"
that a well-known commenter would be saying something funny
about Ben Stiller's tux.
And then literally a half an hour
later there's a post about *** in the military.
And she's saying something incredibly intelligent
about that.
So you saw, within the space of 15 minutes, 30 minutes,
that they were able to pivot very deftly and intelligently
between hard and soft, superficial and serious.
Which is further underscoring the fact
that women are very diverse and have opinions.
They can walk and chew gum at the same time.
So and sometimes this would be modeled
by the writers themselves.
They did have certain beats.
So it was very unlikely that the political writer or writers
were going to write about reality TV.
They may have watched it, but the kind
of diversity of interest and versatility was, I think,
modeled the most in the comments.
And that just, again, I guess underscored my suspicion
that, again, women can walk and chew gum at the same time.
But I didn't get that many emails
unless it was someone angry that I banned them. [LAUGH]
RICHARD GINGRAS: We're almost running out of time.
So I want to come back to-- Do you have a question, Anna?
AUDIENCE: My first question is you expressed
some embarrassment, I think, about the name of the site
initially, and I was wondering if you could talk about why.
And my second question-- should I ask it now?
RICHARD GINGRAS: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: OK.
Is thinking about what you were saying about feminism
and the version/rejection/repulsion
to the term, the last time that we
had a presidential election-- well, no, before that-- when
Hillary ran, I remember having conversations with women
in their late 20s, which was my age at the time,
and they would say things like, I just
don't think a woman can do the job, which
was really, really horrifying.
And I was wondering what you think about
whether we're ready for some real female leadership?
Oh, and thanks for coming.
ANNA HOLMES: Oh, thanks.
So the first question, why I was uncomfortable with the name.
Well, a lot of the Gawker Media sites had made up names.
I mean Gawker I guess was the real word,
but Jalopnik is a made up word, and Gizmodo is a made up word,
or they're combinations of words put together.
And we were trying to come up with that sort of name
for the site.
And I still have notes somewhere where
we were coming up with ideas.
But none of them worked.
And then I think the reason I didn't
like Jezebel was because it felt obvious to me,
and also because it was a real word.
It wasn't something made up, so it
had a lot of baggage attached to it.
And I guess I thought the idea of reclaiming a word that
meant something bad was too obvious.
It's hard for me to, even now, articulate,
why I had a problem with it beyond that.
And then I actually remember after the site launched,
someone sent us an email, speak emails,
about the name Jezebel, which I was well aware of in terms
of the Bible or the Bette Davis movie.
But I had not been aware that it was also
a word used to describe a sexually promiscuous,
highly emotionally damaged mixed race woman.
And it was used this way in the Southern part of the United
States.
So it was very racially coded.
Had no idea.
Someone sent me a Ph.D. paper about this,
and I remember thinking, this is really bad.
Because I'm mixed race, and the site is not about me.
And there was a little avatar, which
was on the cover, which was a blonde woman.
But that made me feel very uncomfortable,
because-- I believe the term is tragic mulatto.
That was what a Jezebel was.
Like a woman who was a tragic mulatto who
was promiscuous or a ***.
And I really didn't like all the implications of that.
And I think once I decided I didn't like it,
I just didn't like it.
I was being stubborn about it.
But yeah, I wouldn't use the word.
I'd say, and I'd meet someone and then they'd
say, where do you work?
I'd say I work for a blog.
Oh, what blog?
Well, it's done by Gawker Media.
Oh, what is it about?
It's about women.
What is it called?
But I just let it go on until I finally
went [FLAT TONE] Jezebel.
[LAUGHTER]
RICHARD GINGRAS: In the interest of time,
and I want to conflate a second question with one that I wanted
to get into, which is about women in leadership positions.
And even notion of women not necessarily accepting
that they can be in leadership positions.
So a) why do you do what you do?
How are you comfortable doing what you're doing?
Who inspired you to--
ANNA HOLMES: Me?
RICHARD GINGRAS: Yeah, you.
ANNA HOLMES: Well, I don't feel like I'm in a leadership
position right now because--
RICHARD GINGRAS: Not literally at the moment.
ANNA HOLMES: OK.
RICHARD GINGRAS: But you've been in a leadership position.
ANNA HOLMES: I don't know that I ever
had a model of being in a leadership position,
but I feel like I fell into it.
And that there was definitely a part of me
that was absolutely terrified throughout the whole thing,
even when it was you think I could have put my feet up
and relax.
I was absolutely terrified.
Because I didn't know how to be a manager.
I had to teach myself how to be a manager.
And that's a very specific type of job.
There's no water cooler.
You're not taking your employees out to lunch
or shooting the ***.
It's very intense.
I guess I don't know how to answer that question because I
don't know that I've thought that much about it.
I certainly am in awe of women in leadership positions
that are very visible, like in business or in politics,
whether it be Hillary Clinton or any number of female senators,
or females of Supreme Court justices.
I ran into one of them in DC two days ago.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Who?
Not Ginsburg.
ANNA HOLMES: Elena Kagan.
No, I wish Ginsburg.
Not to diss Kagan. [LAUGH]
RICHARD GINGRAS: Justice Ginsburg.
ANNA HOLMES: Yeah, yeah.
But I guess I've given women in leadership positions,
in terms of politics and business thought,
but as totally apart from me, but not
so much how it relates to my own life.
And I think that there's still a certain amount of inability
to imagine--
Well, I think there's a certain amount of insecurity
still about what am I going to do next?
And am I going to be the boss of something?
And what would that look like?
Even though I've done that before.
It's not enough to stop me from doing it,
but it's not like it comes naturally.
Although, I'm told I was very bossy as a child.
So maybe it's in my DNA.
But I do think that a lot of girls
have that socialized out of them in many complex ways
that I'm not immune to, and that I have to challenge as well.
So I'm sorry if I'm avoiding the question,
but it's not one I have a good answer for.
RICHARD GINGRAS: It's truthful.
ANNA HOLMES: Yeah.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Well, let's take one more.
What the heck.
AUDIENCE: So for those of you who are unfamiliar,
Brian Goldberg, who started Bleacher Report put together
a woman's blog.
And I also read a response that you had to it.
I, admittedly, haven't actually looked at Bustle,
so I don't really know much about the content.
But I'm just wondering if you had any tips for him, or what--
ANNA HOLMES: Write something else.
AUDIENCE: --your--
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: --response is to that.
ANNA HOLMES: I should probably put them in context.
Because this young man got $6 million
in funding to start this women's website called Bustle,
and then he'd wrote something that
was published in PandoDaily, Daily which was a very press
release soundy, in which he patted himself on the back
for having come up with the brilliant idea of merging
pop culture and politics for women.
It was the weirdest-- At first I had to read it twice
because he was describing any number of websites that
had been around for a long time, including Jezebel,
or even magazines that had been around long before Jezebel came
along.
RICHARD GINGRAS: [INTERPOSING_VOICES] funding
proposal--
ANNA HOLMES: It was unbelievable.
RICHARD GINGRAS: --for 1998.
ANNA HOLMES: It is so self-aggrandizing.
And naive, and tone deaf, and self-congratulatory,
and it was just weird, and it made me mad
because it was erasing the existence of people
who had pioneered that space long before he had.
It was a bit chest thumpy.
And there's a certain skepticism among a lot of the people
I know in the media, especially women,
to Silicon Valley row chest thumping.
Even though we're not really privy to it because a lot of us
live in New York.
It was just something that just really rubbed me the wrong way.
So I wrote a comment to the post,
along with a number of other women, that wasn't probably
very nice.
I mean I didn't call him names, but I was angry about it,
as were a lot of other people.
So what advice would I give him.
Well, the thing is that he seems to think
that he can build his site into a powerhouse with,
I don't know-- he was talking about 50 million uniques
a month.
Like that's what he wants.
Something enormous like that.
And it's very possible he can do that,
but it's also highly likely that it's not going to be any good.
Because it sounds to me that if he
wants to build a site at that scale with the quickness
that he-- I don't know if it's supposed in five years or what,
but that it's going to be a lot of *** throwing at the wall
and seeing what sticks, as opposed to quality.
And I also don't know if that really
is a way to build a community when
there's just stuff everywhere.
One of my problems with women's media
online, before the site started, the sites
that were online, like iVillage.
I guess that was for older women, which is fine.
But I'm not even sure what--
RICHARD GINGRAS: They weren't older women then.
ANNA HOLMES: It was just incoherent,
in the same way that the "Huffington Post" sometimes
can be incoherent.
It's like something-- too much going on.
So if he wants to make an incoherent media property that
gets 50 million uniques a month and makes
lots of money for him, great, but I'm not sure
it's going to be any good.
But my advice to him would be like shut up.
I don't mean he should like not start a site.
But he should maybe look at the space and talk to people
and take in things before he pops off
like he did in that post.
But I think that he probably was very chastened by it.
It seemed like he was very apologetic by it.
And I actually felt sorry for him after a while,
until "The New Yorker" article came out,
and then there was that picture of him
using a woman as a table-- one of his female employees
as a table, on which he rested his laptop.
And I was like, OK, I don't feel sorry for you anymore.
[LAUGHTER]
ANNA HOLMES: Yeah.
I actually haven't looked at that site at all.
I just think I'm not interested.
At some point I'll go look at it.
Are you bringing it up?
RICHARD GINGRAS: It's right there.
ANNA HOLMES: Oh.
RICHARD GINGRAS: It actually managed
to nail national cat day today.
ANNA HOLMES: Wow, OK.
I thought it was uber national cat day, or is it--
RICHARD GINGRAS: No.
I'm told it's national cat day.
ANNA HOLMES: I thought you were going
to talk about the crazy cat lady?
RICHARD GINGRAS: Well, I was.
And since we're not getting kicked out of the room,
yes, it is national cat day.
I heard somewhere that your favorite post
was about cat ladies--
ANNA HOLMES: Oh, no no.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Not post, your entry.
ANNA HOLMES: It's not my favorite entry.
The thing is that I've looked at the text in the book
so many times and read the posts over so many times
that they all kind of are a blur to me.
And what I like about the crazy cat lady [INAUDIBLE]
is just an illustration, done by a San Francisco illustrator,
is that it, like some other posts,
takes a historically maligned type of individual,
the crazy cat lady, and honors her in a very loving way.
Because I would describe myself as a crazy cat lady.
I don't have eight cats.
I have one.
But just like there's just certain things
that people who have pets or cats know.
And that's why I particularly like that post.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Well, thank you.
And that's proving, once again, that all conversations
ultimately get around back to cats.
ANNA HOLMES: That's right, on the internet.
Yeah.
RICHARD GINGRAS: So I thank you usually
for being here with us today, and more importantly,
for doing what you do.
And--
ANNA HOLMES: Thank you.
RICHARD GINGRAS: I just can't wait to see what you do next.
ANNA HOLMES: Thank you.
Thanks, Richard.
RICHARD GINGRAS: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]